Ravi Vakil

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Ravi D. Vakil (born February 22, 1970, Toronto, Ontario, Canada) is a Canadian-American mathematician. Vakil attended high school at Martingrove Collegiate Institute in Etobicoke, Ontario, where he won several mathematical contests and olympiads. After earning a BSc and MSc from the University of Toronto in 1992, he completed a Ph.D. in mathematics at Harvard University in 1997. He has since been an instructor at both Princeton University and MIT. Since the fall of 2001, he has taught at Stanford University, becoming a tenured associate professor in 2005.

Vakil is an algebraic geometer who has solved several old problems in Schubert calculus. Among other results, he proved that all Schubert problems are enumerative over the real numbers, a result that resolves an issue mathematicians have worked on for at least two decades.

Vakil has received an NSF Career Fellowship, a Sloan Research Fellowship, an American Mathematical Society Centennial Fellowship, a G. de B. Robinson Prize for the best paper published in the Canadian Journal of Mathematics and the Canadian Mathematical Bulletin, and the André-Aisenstadt Prize from the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques at the University of Montreal.

Vakil was the fourth person to be a 4-time Putnam Fellow in the history of the contest. Also, he is currently the coordinator for the Putnam preparation seminar at Stanford. The seminar, which meets informally Monday nights, consists of two sessions. In the first, Ravi presents a 10–15 minute snippet of ideas on a mathematical theme such as generating functions, inequalities, number theory, combinatorics, etc. Students then try to solve challenging problems based on this theme and write their solutions on the board after 40–45 minutes. The second session consists of a "master problem solving" class; here, students present much more challenging problems that they have solved during the week. Vakil is known to Stanford undergrads for his encouraging ethos of Putnam and problem solving.